That is the whole point. They are redesiging the entire processor to be on a generic carrier, so that it can be easily swapped. On low power, high efficiency cores, the heat sink requirements are much less, so the physical design is easier.

what's people's opinion on this new Ram cube option given the new membership ? and the fact they say it has even greater potential speed than wideIO
http://denalimemoryreport.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/arm-hp-and-sk-hynix-join-hybrid-memory-cube-consortium-hmcc-first-spec-due-by-end-of-year/#comment-350

that seems simple enough when you make these rack of ARM on SODIMM carrier with 4 SOC per SODIMM, and move the RAM on these to the main daughter server board
you make sure to use Wide IO as per Samsung's ARM speced Block.
the key is to keep as much generic kit as you can from the mobile space upgraded to the servers space requirement today, then slowly or even faster move all of today's dual/quad mobile and static SOC home devices into that same ARM on SODIMM + daughter board configuration...
presto facebook or their future agents can sell these older ARM on SODIMM SOCK + daughter boards to their end users :) every one wins and make a profit as one example.

surely the problem here is that if you upgrade a 1 core cpu card with a 2 or 4 core one, that you will be expecting 4 times the memory bandwidth. It is unlikely you would have designed your system to have 4 times the necessary memory bandwidth to start with, so just updating the cores will be less than effective as they will clash for memory resource. I presume that most of the work FB's servers are doing are very short transactions (eg when someone puts a short message on a page) so processors will be constantly having to get new data as they swap from serving one user to serving another. This implies huge disk and/or internal network bandwidth to fetch that user's page.
Unless of course they are planning to keep each of the 1billion accounts alive in DRAM in their farm 24/7 - in which case I expect the memory manufacturers will be rubbing their hands with glee.

Hi Rick,
A minor correction: Tilera's processor core has a "MIPS-like" instruction set, but it is not a MIPS licensed processor, so calling it MIPS-based is misleading.
Ironically, one of the first "wimpy core" server processor was the "Niagara" UltraSPARC-T1, but that line of servers has not gotten much attention of late.

Probably more about supporting upstream procesors that can be pin compatible in a family.
Quad ARMs are not ready except from Invidia.
Duals are abundant and will be priced accordingly.
If you can drop in a quad A9 in 18 months it will be cheap because everyone will have figured it out. The dual 15 with dual A9 would be nice to be in a version that can drop into the same slot. Evn if it gives up some features of its bigger pin count brothers...and on and on. The CPU churn rate is mutch faster than the rack-server infrastructure evolves. so it makes sense to want to put a few releases of CPU's in the same infrastructure. Or rip it out each time you want to go to the next 10% improvement?

Why replace? Why not expand with the new agnostic topology? (not just the cpu per say but the echosystem that surounds it as well.
Is the wimpy cpu just about serving up utube and facebook type web page feeds?
whats the need difference for a data streaming for a financial application for example v.s. a utube video?